Using Twitter Effectively for Publicity
Rhode Islander Catherine Damiani, a longtime Twitter account manager, explains how she keeps East Providence Public Library's account active and interesting. She covers getting ideas for posts, finding followers, using hashtags, scheduling posts, and improving the feed by studying the analytics.

Special Report

Dancing Our Way Through PLA 2016 in Denver
MLS editor Kathy Dempsey attended the PLA (Public Library Association) 2016 Conference in Denver and condensed much of the marketing-related content to share with readers here. Her coverage includes big guests and big ideas, internal communications and external outreach, and, of course, dancing librarians.

How-to

After ESSA: How to Help School Libraries
Current ALA president Sari Feldman helps to simplify the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which was recently reauthorized with specific language that clearly includes K–12 librarians as educators. She cuts through the law's legalese to tell us exactly what ESSA means for school libraries and what we need to do to benefit from its funding potential.

Tools You Can Use

Social Media Monitoring Tools
Techie and tool lover Jennifer E. Burke contributes her second installment of this department. This time, she points to four products that can help you track your social media mentions and statistics, so you'll know who's talking about your library and how often.

What to Wear; What to Watch
Ruth Kneale studies how librarians and libraries appear in pop culture. In this issue, she covers a librarian calendar gone awry, fashion tips from The Chronicle of Higher Education, an ethnographic study of stereotypes, and an online list of "The Coolest Librarians From Pop Culture."

Your Library Is the Answer: Demonstrating Relevance to Tech-Savvy Learners
by Christina T. Russo and Cathy Swan
Former school librarian and current LIS professor Mary Ann Bell reviews this 2015 Libraries Unlimited title about how to make K–12 libraries relevant to today's students. She finds it to be useful for many people in the school arena, including teachers and principals.

This issue's additional news page explicitly covers information released and a feature demonstrated during April's PLA (Public Library Association) Conference. It includes a bibliotheca self-check feature that encourages extra ebook and audiobook circulation, a "Core Customer Intelligence" report on Big Data from CIVICTechnologies, a series of library-promo videos from PLA, and a "Libraries and Learning" report from Pew Research Center.

Announcement of the November 2016 Library Marketing and Communications Conference, a Library Journal article that names advocacy, communications, and marketing as top skills librarians will need in the next 20 years, EveryLibrary hits the $100 million mark in funding it helped win, the "2016 State of America's Libraries" report, and winners of the LibraryAware Community Award.